Before introducing, we had our hopes up that the UA Introduction would be well received. But this... we are truly humbled with the overwhelming attention and support we have gotten thus far from many-many-many people from the Steem Community. Thank you all for your support and engagement!!!

In this post, the second one posted via our new @steem-ua account, we'll talk about several exciting updates and some news on @steem-ua and the UA-API. Here we go!

After a few test-voting rounds, since last Sunday (August 26 2018) @steem-ua began using its algorithmic curation & upvoting mechanism with @steem-ua SP Delegators only. Since all types of content are welcome on @steem-ua, and because we cannot upvote every possible post published via the Steem Blockchain, we decided to let the @steem-ua bot curate, score & upvote posts published by @steem-ua SP delegators:

PS1: delegation requirements could be subject to change, we'll then post about that prior to changes being applied.PS2: @steem-ua reserves the right to reject upvoting accounts demonstrating abusive behavior.

If you want to participate on delegating STEEM POWER to @steem-ua, either to get your own content curated & upvoted, and/or to enter the additional "high-SP @steem-ua Sponsor Rewards Program", and/or if you simply want to support us and give more powerful upvotes to those accounts that deserve a juicy upvote to their magnificent contributions, here are some

What's happening with the SP Delegations that @steem-ua is empowered with, is - to my knowledge at least - never seen before at this scale and this fast on the Steem Blockchain. Shy under 6 days of being "LIVE", these are the top-15 Delegatee Accounts ranked by their number of delegators, at the time of writing this post:

#

account

number of delegators

delegated SP

1

minnowbooster

1400

675783

2

smartsteem

794

3003688

3

minnowsupport

434

94514

4

tipu

429

1007239

5

steem-ua

329

216386

6

dmania

272

47187

7

steemhunt

261

1718172

8

justyy

225

35435

9

jerrybanfield

207

572945

10

actifit

200

110715

Holy Macaroni! Coming from nowhere, being "LIVE" for only 6 days, having published 1 Intro Post before, you guys have now TurboBoosted@steem-ua to be the #5 most delegated account on the Steem Blockchain!!! YEAH!
That is nothing short of AMAZING! One can only wonder: Exactly how many accounts will eventually delegate to @steem-ua to empower its Algorithmic Curation Program to support @steem-ua, themselves and eachother? Will you also help us to get #1? Please do so!

After talking to several people, including @paulag who has been working on her own Steem Contribuion Score, we decided to incorporate the level of user engagement in our own algorithmic curation model. Our new and improved formula, which includes scoring a post's user engagement to ultimately compute our upvote with, is now like this:

UA_Vote = x * UA_Account + y * UA_Post + z * UA_Comment

To explain things simple:

the higher your own account's UA score, and

the better the votes on your post, computed by all post voters' UA scores, and

the more interaction on your post via the comments
... the more powerful our upvote to your post!

Earlier today, in the last voting round, we introduced our new "Smart Comments" System: as we are constantly trying to improve everything we do, why not add some useful info in our comments, right after evaluating content and voting on it?

Starting today, @steem-ua is, via the SmartComments, trying to help you improve:

how to get more followers,

get more people reading your post,

get more and higher upvotes from other accounts,

more and better interaction / user engagement on your content,

and ultimately a higher upvote from us as well!

UA-API, our Data Providing Service for UA Registered Partners

Many people representing other dApps, Promotional Services, Communities, External Crypto Assets integrating with STEEM for Airdrops, and others, have contacted us over the past few days to request for access on UA-API. Due to the overwhelming level of attention, interest and support, and the many questions that come with it, we tried our best to help each and everyone asgood as we could!

Documentation of UA-API Methods on our website

We've added a few API Request Methods already, and documented its usage on our website. In case you're interested to learn more, have a look at https://steem-ua.com/api-documentation. Of course, the methods documented there, are only the beginning: we plan to implement more functionality and upscale the speed and responsiveness of our UA-API as we progress.

@therealwolf, Founding father of Smartsteem contacted us almost immediately after having published our Intro Post regarding integration with UA-API. Smartsteem is an investment and promotion-service for the Steem blockchain, doing so in a sustainable and ethical manner. Implementing UA_Account scores right into Smartsteem's system, both enhances the experience of valid Smartsteem users as well as providing a quality metric to Smartsteem's investors. We're happy to integrate UA with Smartsteem, and improve together!

Having "invented" UA originally for@utopian-io as being the "Utopian Advisor" at the time, integrating UA-API at @utopian-io's own voting algorithm is of course only natural. Therefore we're proud to present the following partnership with @utopian-io:

Utopian will integrate with UA-API asap, and is looking to do so at its forthcoming Hackathon later this month (September 2018). We've been told there will be bounties even, so be sure - when you're interested - to prove your skills and integrate it!

@utopian-io and @steem-ua have the same "roots", which from now on translates into @utopian-io delegating a hefty amount of SP to @steem-ua and @steem-ua will also algorithmically curate & upvote approved Utopian contributions even when the contributors are not delegating to @steem-ua themselves! (Of course every Utopian Contributor is still very very welcome to delegate to @steem-ua !)

Hi! Great and thanks! :-)
PS1: there's no need to confirm your delegation transaction, as we scan & stream all blockchain blocks live. So at 3 seconds after delegating to @steem-ua, we know ;-)
PS2: feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord Server! Lots of info shared there as well, and we're having fun there too!

As far as I know, the voted post must be at least 6 hours old. Also there are something like "voting rounds", and if your post doesn't make it into this round, I guess it gets the chance to increase it's UA for the next round until the post is either too old to get voted, or it gets voted early enough ;)
That's at least how I think it is

I'm just wondering if the new ua system could be gamed by useless bots who are following everybody just to destroy their ua score. Please consider a cap on the negative impact of such behaviour. I got about 1000 useless following and I can't get rid of them...so is it my fault that so many nonsense accounts are following me? No its not their are many accounts who just follow everybody just to push the I follow you now you follow me prinicipal. And I also could see a lot of whales gathering together just to increase their score without creating good content. What are you guys planning to prevent such bad behaviour?

we are taking into account the following and voting behavior of bots already. Also (since we're only "live" for 7 days now) are still "tweaking the knobs" for optimal settings: WiP!

no worries if you get followed by bots / people you don't know of: doesn't hurt your UA rankings in case you "act like a human being" over time;

the "whales" (in terms of SP) do naturally get followers, even for doing nothing but owning the steem / sp & sbd: because "people follow the money". We initiate the UA algo with a sub-algo called "WitnessRank", but those need to be "active" and "up-to-date". We're also testing out an improved & dynamical "dampening factor" d which decreases the "UA Trust" of witnesses as they are "inactive" over time (where "inactive" is defined by a number of metrics, which we are evaluating weights to for optimization).

I think it was pretty clear since many people reply and engage with others but not so many upvote their followers’ comments...

Now I don’t suggest that all comments should be upvoted since there are also a lot of spam/ trash comments. But there are also useful and meaningful ones which don’t get the love they deserve
Just saying too...

Congratulations on all the delegation you guys are getting and for coming up with such a good idea. I'll be delegating to this soon as well.

I'm curious to know how long after a post is published does your bot upvote that post or make the calculations of how many comments the post received.

I curate a community called Open Mic and while there are a lot of comments on my weekly posts, they come in throughout the week the contest runs. If your bot makes calculations before all those comments come in it could be missing the true amount of engagement happening there. I'm just curious of the timing you guys use or how you take that into account.

Keep up the good work and you have a new follower.

I just checked and your site says I have a UA score is 6.199 and a US rank of 221. I guess that's pretty good, but hey, the largest room in the world is room for improvement.

i was thinking about that too, but now as i read your comment it makes sense that it is some kind of average comments on your posts (not sure is average on all your posts to much calculation) or something like that.

I don't know. Will leave that to your numbers people. The app is incented to vote early on a post to get rewarded, but, like in my case, the comments come in all the way up to the last minute before payout. So I'm not sure how you would balance that.

from the discord talk
"- currently a post needs to be at least 6 hours old before we're curating / upvoting it

UA_Comment is a very complex algorithmic computation that looks at a number of things regarding comments / user engagement, and who is engaging how"
so not really sure what that means but it is not just number of comments

I don’t know why I get so exciting on this improvement on Steemit. I can see you purpose to push Steemit to another height and improve the whole system on publish and evaluating quality Steemian. Keep on and wait how @steem-ua goes to another height too

@steem-ua is great boon for correct user access... @scipio have been phenomenal contributor for utopian and now he is the main conttibitor for the greates revolution.
Not only this already got my first upvote from @steem-ua after my initial delegation. Would delegate more in coming days as and when i accumulate my SP.

I wish i could delegate all my SP. But nees to keep somsthing as well....thanks @steem-ua

After reading this, having discussed steem-ua in the @helpie meetup tonight and seeing the potential of having a far better reputation algorithm than the one provided by steemit.com, I've just delegated my first 50SP :-)

Thank you people for implementing this when steemit inc. didn't do anything with this great idea <3

Hard work pays off and you guys totally deserve it. @steem-ua will improve Steemit experience 1000% Being already on the fifth place in under a week indicates that this is a massive community effort from people who really care!

Thanks for all the updates and clarifications as well as for your constant help on Discord.

Hello everyone and especially to this project @ steem-ua, yesterday I made my delegation for 25 SP, I know it is very little, but my SP, it is not much, I have a community that I support and could not give more, I hope that be enough. Do not take capture, I trusted this project, I thought it was very good.

I see your account, @steem-ua, is currently at 98.89% voting power (as of 8:44 PM
Tuesday, September 4, 2018 GMT).

That's rather high, which has me wondering how, exactly, you have it set up to vote. I was under the impression that delegating 250 SP would automatically cause this account to upvote the first seven posts of any given week. That obviously isn't the case, since I delegated that amount and never received an upvote for a post that I made at a later date.

They vote, it seems, on posts that are 36-48 hours old. They give you the best return for sp delegated out there... Currently. Jump into the discord and talk to them. Btw keeping the vp at 98-99% is ideal.